Leonard (16 page)

As I wrote in my autobiography,
Up Till Now,

Star Trek
became a language that bound together a large group of people with common interests. It became a sun with great gravitational pull that drew all kinds of people to it, where they could meet others just like themselves.

Wearing costumes.

Among the best-known people who attended the first official
Star Trek
Convention in New York in 1972 were Gene Roddenberry, Majel Barrett, Isaac Asimov, and Hal Clement. NASA provided an eighteen-wheeler with displays to excite visitors about our space program. There was an art show, a dealer's room, and a costume competition. The organizers expected the usual five hundred or so people who generally attended science-fiction conventions; instead, more than a thousand fans showed up. Many vendors sold out their memorabilia within hours. Within three years, twenty-three conventions were being held around the country. Thirty thousand Trekkies showed up at a convention in Chicago. Soon there was a convention being held somewhere in this country—and stretching to Europe—every weekend.

When all this started, I really wanted little to do with it.
Star Trek
was my past, and I did not want it being confused with my future. And, on some level, this whole thing made me a little uncomfortable. There was a sort of cultlike element to it. On some level, the passion of these people for a TV show scared me. Once, during our third season, as I left NBC Studios in Rockefeller Center after doing publicity, fans sort of descended on me and literally tried to rip my jacket off my back.

I turned down the first few invitations because I thought it wasn't dignified. Actors don't go to conventions. That's for mobs! Actors act! Leonard felt differently; he didn't take the whole thing quite so seriously. Even before the conventions began, he was making personal appearances at state fairs around the country. He often would bring his guitar with him, sing a few songs, tell a few
Star Trek
stories, sign a lot of autographs. Adam Nimoy once compared it to a traveling medicine man show. Leonard was always wonderful with fans. He was patient and friendly. He attended the second convention in New York in 1973 only because he happened to be in the city at the time. He wasn't paid, and his appearance wasn't announced beforehand in case something more important came up and he had to leave. Essentially, he just showed up.

By the time I attended my first convention in 1975, organizers were paying a reasonable fee. Actually a very nice fee. I didn't know what was expected of me; one of the organizers told me, “Just be prepared for endless love and people telling you how much they love your work.”
Well, it couldn't possibly be that easy,
I thought. When I walked out on stage, I had no prepared remarks; I was just going to wing it. I received a huge ovation when my name was announced, causing me to wonder what I'd done to deserve it. I'd anticipated a nice small gathering; instead, the entire room was crammed, and several thousand fans were looking at me with love. And then I realized these people had expectations I was not ready to meet. I didn't even know what they wanted from me. So I fumbled through a few remarks and then, mostly in desperation, I asked if anyone had any questions.

Eight thousand hands went up. Hallelujah! I was saved.
Oh my goodness,
I thought,
this is great.
That day I heard for the first time many of the same questions I would be asked over and over through the next few decades. What surprised me was how specific these questions were and how much knowledge these people had about the show. They actually had far more knowledge about it than I did. Truthfully, there are many, many episodes of
Star Trek
that I have never seen. I have great difficulty watching myself on screen and try to avoid it. (Yes, I know the obvious joke that might fit here; no, I'm not going to write it!) I haven't seen too much of Denny Crane or any of the many others characters I played either. I did, however, watch the movie I had made in the universal language of Esperanto, Incubus. I'd made it just before we started filming
Star Trek,
and by the time it was released, I had already forgotten how to speak the language, so like the few people who actually saw this film, I didn't understand it either.

Eventually, the convention circuit became an important revenue source for many of the cast and crew. Jimmy Doohan bought a large mobile home and drove around the country appearing at conventions. With his appearance fee and the money he earned signing autographs, he probably earned more money than he would have from acting. For several members of the crew, these conventions were practically lifesaving because they had become typecast, making it difficult for them to get meaningful work. Jimmy would walk into a casting office, for example, and be told, “We don't need a Scotsman.” He probably pointed out that they didn't have one: “I'm a Canadian, and I'm Irish!”

Actors, producers, writers, anyone who had been part of it was welcome. If you hammered three nails into the set, you were a welcome guest. Leonard and I probably attended at least one hundred different conventions together, and this became the glue that cemented our friendship. At many of them, we appeared on stage together and told stories. For me, that was the most fun. Leonard loved poking fun at me for something I'd done, and the audience loved hearing about it. If I close my eyes, I can visualize Leonard pointing at me and saying in the most accusatory voice, “This is the man who stole my bicycle. He is not a nice man. What kind of man steals an alien's bicycle?”

At the beginning, I suspect, Leonard was as dubious as I was about this phenomenon. I know I wondered what type of people would spend their time dressing in costume and paying tribute to a moderately successful TV series. It's fair to say that conventional people did not attend these conventions. But I think we both came to understand how much fun these conventions were for Trekkies. These were people, for the most part, who were able to overcome their inhibitions and put on a pair of alien ears; they didn't waste time worrying what other people thought. They were simply having fun. Later in his life, Leonard was asked what words of wisdom he might have for young people; he replied thoughtfully, “I'm a great believer in what we have been told by people like [mythologist-] Joseph Campbell, ‘Find your bliss.' Find out what touches you the most deeply. Pursue it, learn about it, explore it, expand on it. Live with it and nurture it. Find your own way and make your own contribution.”

Find your bliss. Find the route to your own happiness. If attending a convention helped put people on that path, if it added even a little joy to people's lives, then I was glad to be part of it. Admittedly, it took me some time to realize that and truly appreciate it. And I was equally glad to be paid to be part of it.

As the conventions got larger and larger, and the appearance fees increased, both Leonard and I began attending several of them a year. Because we had top billing, we were able to make demands. Just like rock stars! I insisted on hot tea, for example. And Leonard, Leonard was a lot tougher than I was. He demanded a pint of Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream in his dressing room. Not mocha, not chocolate—coffee. And it had to be cold, and he had to have a spoon. This is the kind of thing that can happen when an actor gets too powerful! Often the very first thing he would do when he arrived at the venue was stalk into the green room, go to the food table, grab that ice cream, rip off the top, and start eating. After a couple of bites, he was ready to go. Perhaps the hardest part of doing the convention circuit was answering the same questions over and over with any type of enthusiasm. After a while, it became rote. The question asked most often to each of us was what our favorite episode was. No one would believe that was hard for me, but because I hadn't seen them all, I couldn't compare them. Most often I would respond that it was too hard to judge, but in fact I do have a soft spot for a wonderful story called “The Trouble with Tribbles.” Leonard said he loved “The Devil in the Dark” episode, the “Amok Time” episode in which he created the salute and said “Live long and prosper” for the first time, and an episode written by the legendary writer Harlan Ellison, “The City on the Edge of Forever,” in which crew members from the
Enterprise
go through a time warp and end up in New York City during the Depression. Leonard's least favorite episode, by the way, was our first show of the third season, “Spock's Brain.” In this story, a beautiful alien woman gets on board the
Enterprise
and steals Spock's brain to save a civilization that needed it to control its power systems. Unfortunately, it turned Spock into a zombie, resulting in McCoy being forced to say what might have been the single worst line of the entire series, “Jim. His brain is gone!”

Putting on the ears was one thing, but having to play a zombie? That part of Leonard's career had ended a long time earlier.

One night at a convention in Anaheim, Walter Koenig was answering the usual questions; by this time, he had all his pat answers and just pulled out the right one without having to think about it. That was true for all of us. But suddenly Walter found himself standing on stage, staring at the audience in total silence. Not one word was coming out of his mouth. He realized he had been skating through it without really paying any attention. He asked the fan to repeat the question, which was “If Chekov went to Disneyland, what would his favorite ride be?”

Thinking quickly, he responded, “Small World,” because on this ride all the people of the planet were united.

The thing I disliked most about the conventions was signing hundreds and hundreds of autographs. I understood how important that was for the guests, but it was so impersonal. The whole object was to sign as many autographs as possible in the briefest time. We were told that the proper way to sign autographs is to never look up and make eye contact with an individual and never get involved in a conversation. The convention organizers made a considerable amount of their revenue from autographs and wanted us to sign every last one of them. It is highly organized: one person to one side slides the picture or book in front of us, we sign it without looking up, slide it to the person sitting on the other side who hands it to the fan, next.

I never really got very good at the not-looking-up part of it. I just couldn't help myself; I needed to look up and greet each person. I did get very good at the signing fast part, but nobody could top Leonard. Nobody. At one event, he was racing to finish so he could get to the airport and make his flight. The line was moving too slowly for him, so finally he got up from behind the table, went to each person in line, asked him or her to turn around, and then leaned on his or her back and signed the item. He signed his way to the end and then just kept going out the door and to the airport. They calculated he signed approximately 1,700 items in an hour, which has to stand as the all-time record.

While I came to enjoy attending these conventions, admittedly, I didn't completely grasp the appeal. It is difficult to find fault with being treated with total awe and respect, but inside it was impossible not to wonder if these people were seeing something in me that I didn't appreciate. In 1986, I was invited to host
Saturday Night Live
. By then, the concept of Trekkies was as well known as Grateful “Deadheads.” In the opening skit written for me, I addressed the Trekkies, telling them, “Before I answer any more questions, there's something I wanted to say. Having receiving all of your letters over the years, and I've spoken to many of you, and some of you have traveled, y'know, hundreds of miles to be here, I'd just like to say … get a life, will you, people? I mean, for crying out loud, it's just a TV show …

“I mean, how old are you people?… [M]ove out of your parents' basements! And get your own apartments and grow the hell up! I mean, it's just a TV show, damn it. It's just a TV show.”

It actually was intended to be a joke. And most Trekkies got the joke and began greeting each other by suggesting, “Get a life.” But not everybody thought it was funny. It did not take long before I understood what Leonard had learned after titling his book
I Am Not Spock.
There are some people who took the mythology very seriously, perhaps too seriously. It actually was several years later, when I put on a mask and began interviewing people at conventions while working on a book and documentary aptly entitled
Get a Life
that I finally appreciated the fact that
Star Trek
was simply an escape from reality into a few moments of fantasy. And rather than being socially inept clichés as I had described them, Trekkies were instead, as Isaac Asimov said, “intelligent, interested, involved people with whom it is a pleasure to be, in any numbers. Why else would they have been involved in
Star Trek
, an intelligent, interested, and involved show?” And then he added, “Only once, in fact, did the general order and decorum break at one of these conventions, and that was when Mr. Spock (okay, Leonard Nimoy) made a brief appearance! And then the young women did do a little screaming!”

 

EIGHT

It was these conventions that kept the franchise alive and led to the movies and the various TV series. For several years, we'd been hearing rumors that Paramount was considering reviving the series or producing a low-budget feature, but it never seemed to materialize. Finally, in 1975, they hired Roddenberry to write a screenplay. Typical of Roddenberry, he came up with an unexpected twist: the bad guy turned out to be God.

Incubus
made more commercial sense.

Paramount then brought in Harlan Ellison, who created a story about the
Enterprise
time traveling back to the prehistoric era to save the future by fighting a race of giant reptiles. This was about the same time that
Chariots of the Gods,
a book by Erich von Däniken claiming that alien visitors had revealed their secrets to the ancient Mayans, was a huge sensation. During story meetings, a studio executive suggested Ellison add some Mayans to his concept. When Ellison explained patiently that in prehistoric times there were no Mayans, the executive said brightly, “Nobody'll know the difference!”